- Question
- Should hate speech be illegal?
- Position‹3 of 3
- Hate speech shouldn't concern the law
Hurtful words will always be around. Bullies, passive aggressiveness, and slander are simply a part of society that everyone must grow up with and ignore. If people put up with verbal aggression like this, then hate speech should be tolerated too.
The argument
The case for criminalising hate speech rests on the harm it does: it wounds, it intimidates, and it leaves those targeted worse off psychologically. Proponents of this position accept that premise and press it further, because the moment harm becomes the ground for prohibition, consistency requires asking what else clears the same bar. Verbal abuse is the obvious comparison. Sustained abuse produces anxiety and diminished self-esteem in exactly the way hate speech is said to — the mechanism is the same, and for a person abused daily by someone close to them the cumulative damage may well exceed that done by a stranger's slur. The same holds for slander, which can destroy a reputation and a livelihood; for bullying, a recognised cause of lasting psychological injury; for emotional manipulation; and for the sustained passive aggression that can make a workplace or a household unbearable. None of these is a criminal offence. Society tolerates all of them, addressing them — where it addresses them at all — through social disapproval, employment rules or civil remedies rather than the criminal law. That leaves an inconsistency the argument regards as fatal. Either harmful speech in general warrants criminal prohibition, in which case the law must reach the bully, the manipulator and the abuser too, an expansion almost nobody advocates; or harm alone is not sufficient ground for prohibition, in which case hate speech cannot be singled out by appeal to it. To demand criminal sanction for one category of harmful speech while shrugging at the rest is, on this view, not a principled position but a hypocritical one — a judgement about which speakers are objectionable, dressed up as a general concern about injury. Hate speech should therefore not concern the law.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Verbal abuse should be punished for as well as hate speech. But hate speech attacks someone because of their identity, not their character. Hating a specific group of people hinders their lifestyle and socialization with others.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Hate speech has bigger consequences than verbal abuse.